90% of baseball is mental. The other half is physical.
Yogi Berra
You have just been drafted to coach your child's baseball team. Visions of Williamsport dance in your head as you head to the first practice.
How hard can it be? You like kids, you know winning isn't everything, and you're commited to making this a wonderful experience for your child.
Two hours later you are ready to be committed to the local asylum.
Yogi Berra was right.
Hitting a baseball is one of the most difficult things to do in any
sport. Failure on any given pitch is the rule, and there is no place to hide.
Imagine standing in the batter's box. Behind you the catcher razzes you, trying to distract you. A few feet away, your coach screams encouragement with the traditional (but mostly useless) aphorisms one throws at a batter.
Strike One!
The pitcher stands just yards from your head; her1 arm is lively but not terribly accurate. Two batters have already been plunked, and it's only the second inning.
Strike Two!
Meanwhile, you can hear your mother pleading for a hit--she's trying to be encouraging, but the desperation in her voice cannot be hidden. Your throat tightens a little bit.
Strike Three!
The words release you from your prison--you have been freed to return to the dugout, another bad at bat. 2
At the beginning of every
season, I assured each and every player that they would hit the ball before the season is over. I made the promise solemnly and sincerely, and I never had to apologize at the end of the season. The kids believed me, because I knew it was true. I knew it was true because at this level of playing ball, children can be taught to hit if the coach knows what he's doing. I knew what I was doing.
Yogi Berra was right. Confidence is 90% of the game--if you're missing competence, the other half of the equation, your confidence plummets, and you will not be able to play the game. This happens at all levels, even the Major Leagues. Just ask Steve Blass, a pitcher who suddenly (and inexplicably) lost the strike zone. Or Chuck Knoblauch. Or Rick Ankiel...3.
You will develop your own style, but the fundamentals remain the same at all levels of play. At the Little League level, knowing what not to do will make you better than most coaches. Watch the good ones run a practice. Some are sweethearts, some play gruff, but all have three things in common.
They know how to play the game. They know how to teach. And they love children. The last is probably the most important, but it alone is not enough to get you by. All the praise and after-game sodas in the world cannot replace competence.
Reams of paper have been devoted to teaching a child how to bat. (Chuck Tanner's book listed below does it best of those I have read.) Let's first run through the list of things to avoid.
A heavy bat
The boys are more prone to this, it seems. Children judge bats by their weight, which makes sense for someone in their pre-Newtonian stage of development. At a given speed, a heavier bat will, in fact, launch a ball farther.
At a given weight, however, velocity of the bat matters exponentially more than weight.
(Compounding the problem is the cost of fancy equipment these days. Dad goes to buy the latest in titanium technology; he sees it's going to cost well over a hundred dollars; he figures he'll buy a bat his child will grow into. He does not want to see his child using a dinged up cheap aluminum team bat, even if the old bat works better for his child. Please remind parents that you cannot buy hits.)
It all comes down to bat speed, or the velocity of the head of the bat when it (finally) makes contact with the ball.
kinetic energy = 1/2 x mass x velocity2
I actually use this as a rallying cry--M V Squared! M V Squared!--at their age,if they say something loud and often enough, it becomes real. Some days we chanted Batspeed! Batspeed! Batspeed! It takes off the peer pressure to lift the heavy bat. A child can pick up a lighter bat without getting his genderhood challenged.
This also works with the parents--if you (or even better, the child) tell a parent "M V Squared matters," the vast majority will smile and nod as though Newton was their first cousin. Especially if their child can hit a baseball now.
A forced stance
The stance is the easiest thing to teach ("Just stand like this"). Unfortunately, it is also mostly useless. Every player has a different stance. No matter what the stance, every good hitter will move his body forward through the batter's box towards the pitcher, keeping her backfoot planted, but the initial stance has almost nothing to do with the subsequent motion.
I have seen coaches line up their players and prescribe quite detailed and specific stances for their players with the solemnity of a coronation. A stance is not like a shoe size. Since it really does not matter (provided the player is square to the plate and facing the pitcher), let the player show their individuality here.
(On the other hand, though the particulars of a stance matter little, a consistent stance matters a lot. A good coach knows his players' stances--if the stance starts changing a bit, the player may be having some mechanics problems.)
Thinking
You just got lesson number one. Don't think, it can only hurt the ball club.
Crash Davis in Bull Durham
Teaching a new motor skill requires repetition of the movements you want to learn. Eventually the cerebellum learns to fire the muscles in the desired sequence at the desired strength, and muscle memory takes over conscious planning. A baby's first steps are terribly awkward--each step requires massive amounts of thinking. A 4 year old walks without a thought.
Once a child learns how to swing a bat properly, conscious thought will only interfere with a smooth swing.
Some thinking is needed, of course. The child ought to be aware of the count, but only so far as it affects his decision to swing. Giving advice to a child on how to swing in the middle of a game borders on the ludicrous. "Keep your eye on the ball...swing higher...swing lower...you're late...you're early...move closer in ...move farther back..."
Watch a good coach. She's chatting away as any coach will, but she's shouting words of encouragement, even nonsensical words. (My battters heard "Big Eyes! Big Eyes!"--initially a reminder during practce to keep their head on the ball, but almost meaningless after a bit.)
The best baseball coach I ever knew just told his kids to "puff on the bat" when they swung--it forces the child to keep his head on the bat as it makes contact, and it's silly enough to keep a child from thinking.
Lying
Getting hit by a pitch hurts, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. I have seen children knocked silly by errant pitches. One child in our league sustained a smashed cheek bone. Children in other leagues have been killed by a ball hitting the chest during a critical point in the cardiac cycle. Getting hit by a pitch is no joke.
So I tell the kids the truth--it hurts. A lot. Kids already know this. Acknowledging what they already know to be true generally makes them braver. A particularly nasty hit can leave a bruise in the shape of the ball's stitchmarks. On our teams, once we wiped away the tears, we showed off the bruises.
Now you may argue that a game that causes these kind of injuries should not be played by children, and I do not disagree with you. Your threshold as a guardian may be lower than mine, and that's fine. Just don't tell your child it "really doesn't hurt." It does.
(When our league got a pitching machine, we were not sure how to use it--if it had instructions, no one read them. As a result, a lot of kids were getting dinged up in the batting cage. To show them the ball stung but would not seriously hurt them, I stood at the plate and let the balls hit me. Yes, I had bruises. Yes, it hurt. No, I did not lie. I told them I knew it hurt. We eventually figured out how to use the machine. Unfortunately, 12 year old pitchers are far less accurate than even a badly operated machine.)
Home runs
Towering fly balls look great. The crowd "Oooohs..." and "Ahhhhs...", and quite frankly, most fly balls in the lower levels result in extra bases. A fly ball in the higher levels, however, will result in an out. Uppercutting to hit a ball high and far will result in more strikeouts. Line drives are the key to hitting success.
Line drives are democratic4--the small child's line drive feels every bit a good as the drive by the testosterone-laden boy with peach fuzz. Line drives get you on base, and in the Little Leagues, getting on base is tantamount to eventually scoring. If you can hang your clothes on a hit, it was a well-tuned rope, a pure hit. The kids will tell you the ball flew off the bat; and it does. You know you hit the sweet spot when the ball caroms of the bat with no resistance, as though it had its own fuel. A zen moment.
The Tao of coaching hitters requires that you know the non-ado. Avoid possessing heaviness, let your stance flow (it is meaningless), do not think, seek the truth, be humble (do not aim for the fences), be useful (hit line drives).
"It's a simple game....You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball."
Staged tantrum by the manager in Bull Durham
It's a simple game, really--but very difficult to play, at any level. If you plan to coach, take the game (but not the competition) seriously. It will reward you in ways you cannot imagine, and, oh, yes, your players will get their deserved hits.
1Gender remains an issue in Little League ball, though officially girls can (and do) play with the boys at the highest level if they have the ability. My daughter played A ball in town. At this age, boys and girls can play equally well.
2Any adult who has been out of baseball for any period of time must be willing to subject themselves to a public batting cage, preferably on a crowded boardalk with family and strangers watching. Set the machine to 70 mph, about the equivalent of what your players will see. Now ask the attendant to aim the machine at your head in random moments. If you are still willing to hang in there, then you can teach hitting.
3Or me--I bowled a lot as a child. I was very good in league play. Inexplicably one day I could not find the lane. I went from strikes to gutterballs. Not once, not twice. 3 or 4 frames in a row. For several games in a row. I can bowl again, but not nearly as well. I am probably a better coach because of it.
4Yep, I stole the concept from Bull Durham; see the movie.
Chuck Tanner's book was "designed" by him--Managing Little League Baseball, written by Ned McIntosh (McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books).
I had an inquiry as to cordis commotio; unfortunately, it is real. Just over a week ago Cornell lost a lacrosse player, after getting hit in the chest, presumably from cordis commotio. see http://www.la12.org/articles/SafetyBaseballs1.pdf and "Lacrosse deaths on rise,
Blows to chest affect heart" in the Ithaca Journal, March 20, 2004, http://www.theithacajournal.com/news/stories/20040320/localnews/115526.html